Obama techie says 'Life of Julia' a campaign highlight

11/19/12 11:36 AM EST

An Obama campaign programmer says there are two moments during the campaign that he is especially proud of: Election Day, when the massive computer systems worked as intended.

The second? The "Life of Julia."

Daniel Ryan, the director of front-end development for Obama for America, tells Nooga.com that the much-mocked and pilloried infographic was "personally rewarding."

"Our team, the policy team and the design team put a lot of effort into that," Ryan told Nooga.

"Julia," introduced by the campaign in May, allowed users to click through the stages of the fictional character's life and see the different ways that President Obama's and Mitt Romney's policies supposedly would have affected the average, middle-class American woman.

Within days of her introduction, conservatives mocked the meme as a demonstration of how to live one's entire life dependent on government programs. Even Mitt Romney got in on the act, calling it "a little cartoon" that shows "the weakness of the president's policies."

Fact-checkers gave the content a thumbs down -- The Washington Post gave her three Pinocchios, while FactCheck.org said there were "bogus assumptions in the Obama campaign's fable."

But for a campaign looking for eyeballs, none of that appears to have mattered.

"It was seen by hundreds of thousands of people and was even the subject of a 'Daily Show' segment," Ryan told Nooga, a news site where he lives in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Such are the metrics for success in a modern-day political campaign, combined with the old adage: all press is good press.